The Girls of Cincinnati

by Jack Engelhard

  “It’s all sales.”

  “Stephanie,” he said. “Is that what’s keeping you here?”

  “Maybe.”

  “We’re only wasting our time here,” he said.

  “Biding our time.”

  “Don’t you know a person has to change his scenery once in a while? A change of place is a change of luck.”

  Now he laughed, about my degree in drama, and all the good it did in a place like Cincinnati, where BOWLERS, and even recreational ARCHERS, far outnumbered theater-goers. At least he had a degree in medicine, or something. Maishe was something of a chameleon. When we used to double-date he’d tell one girl he was a writer, another that he was an actor…artist, diplomat, international businessman, all of it true or false. Once in a while he was a general, or an admiral. The girls believed every word. Even if they didn’t it still didn’t matter because Maishe, more than anybody, had this way with women. Back in high school the girls swooned for him. Maishe took it all in stride. Once in a while he played into it as when the three of us had that accident on a county highway outside Lexington, Myron driving my car into a ditch. Nobody got hurt but when we came back to Cincinnati, Maishe had his arm in a sling and that drove the girls crazy.

  Who but Maishe would have thought of that – certainly not Myron. Myron had no magic with women. Even the un-pretty ones thought they were too good for him. I once fixed him up and there he was in the back seat with her making out like Rudolph Valentino. She gave him practically everything she had. Next day I told her how glad I was that she’d hit it off so well with Myron and she said, “What? I couldn’t stand that creep!” So like I always said, you just don’t figure women. But creep that he was to the opposite sex, it was a given that in the end Myron, more likely than Maishe or me, would have the wife and the picket fence and the kids and the station wagon and the dog.

  As for Maishe, the only sure thing about Maishe was that he was the most popular guy in high school, Woodward High, and later at UC. Even the teachers were smitten. He was so good at being young that he forgot what came next. So he simply refused to grow up and kept two apartments, one here in Mount Adams and the other on campus, right next to a sorority house, so he could continue to be adored. He wasn’t getting older. He’d only submit that the girls were getting younger.

  Maishe had money. Nobody knew where it came from. Nobody knew where HE came from.

  Was he really Israeli? Where were his parents? WHO were his parents? Was his father really a general?

  Maishe’s proper residence was in the Rosemont section with his aunt. Was she really his aunt?

  Even back in high school there were questions about his age. Some said he was in his twenties. Others said he was actually in his thirties. The girls wouldn’t have cared either way, and nobody asked Maishe point blank about anything. At the outset, when he first came on the scene out of nowhere, maybe, maybe then a few questions were asked, but his responses were so vague that they satisfied everybody.

  Chapter 16

  When I got back to my apartment there was a note fastened to my door. Stephanie?

  “Hey, Eli. Where were you? I hope you’re not avoiding me. Eli, this thing between us, we have to get it settled. We can’t go on this way. I can’t stand it anymore. Too bad about her paintings. But it said so in the charts. I’d like to tell you about the rest that’s going to happen. It’s very important for you to know what’s going to happen to her, Eli. The paintings were just the beginning. Love, Sonja.”

  * * *

  As luck would have it, this was Friday night, which would leave me the entire weekend to brood and fret, except that it got worse in a hurry when the phone rang, Fat Jack, who seldom called me at home, especially at midnight, asking where I’d been all night, he’d been dialing me every 15 minutes – to tell me that he’d had a visitor in the showroom. (The bill collectors already had my cell phone number so I kept it mostly off.)

  “A parole officer,” he said, who’d been inquiring as to the whereabouts of one of his employees.

  Took no genius to figure out who that was.

  “She was in jail for seventeen months,” Fat Jack said of Sonja Frick.

  “What did she do?”

  “Nothing much,” Fat Jack said.

  I was relieved. Shoplifting most probably.

  “Except kill her father, that’s all,” Fat Jack added.

  She had PREDICTED his death, as I recalled. Possibly, probably she had a way of helping her predictions along. (“They always blame me.” From her own lips there at the start.) According to Fat Jack, she had been convicted of manslaughter after her father had been found knifed to death in his bed. Earlier, she had been found not guilty in the stabbing death of a boyfriend.

  “Don’t you check your girls out before you hire them?”

  No I did not. I wasn’t hiring Supreme Court Justices here.

  “Girls generally don’t commit murder,” I said.

  “Well this one did, at least twice.”

  “Well…”

  “Well, Eli. Got yourself in a pickle, Eli. Told you to fire her.”

  I had also told myself not to hire her. I should have listened to myself first. Always go with instinct. That is handicapping for horses and for people.

  “Now what do we do?” Fat Jack asked, in one of his rare vulnerable moments; actually seeking my advice.

  We agreed we could not fire her now, not right away – unless we wanted the place burned down or something. She was a person to fear.

  “She scares me to death,” Fat Jack said. “You had to go hire a PSYCHIC? A nut? A lunatic? A murderer? Where’s your sixth sense? Who knows what the hell she’s up to. I only hope this doesn’t get back to Harry Himself. We’re done, if it does. We’re sunk. Aren’t there any more normal people out there, Eli?”

  “Not at six fifty an hour.”

  “We’re getting them from the bus depot now?”

  “Certainly not from Vassar, Fat Jack.”

  “You’re forgetting Stephanie.”

  “That was a fluke.”

  “Yeah, some fluke. I don’t get it, Eli. You start off with a Stephanie and end up with a Sonja.”

  “True. Some people have all the luck.”

  “I hear she’s got the evil eye for Stephanie.”

  “I’ll worry about Stephanie.”

  “Wrong. I’ll worry about Stephanie. She’s my girl, too, you know.”

  In a way, she was. Yes she was.

  “It’s crazy what one person can do,” Fat Jack said.

  “Or undo.”

  “Open the door and who knows what the wind blows in.”

  * * *

  I dialed Stephanie’s number and her mother answered in that high society tone that smartly put you in your place. Her mother, not my biggest fan even when the sun was shining, and now it was raining, asked what business I had calling in the middle of the night, and I didn’t dare tell her that, because of me, her daughter’s life was in imminent danger. I just said it was urgent.

  “Stephanie is out,” she said impatiently, her usual tone with those of us who were not stakes-bred.

  “Out?” I blurted. I hadn’t meant to challenge the good woman, was talking mostly to myself.

  “She doesn’t always come home…”

  Right here she was about to utter my name but either forgot it or decided that it would be too much.

  Would be like admitting I was an actual person.

  “Stephanie,” she said, “has a mind of her own, you know.”

  I knew THAT, but I didn’t know that other thing, that she didn’t always come home. Really!

  If she was out with a guy, that would be a worry. If she was out with a girl, that would be a bigger worry.

  For that girl would probably be Sonja Frick.

  Now THERE was something to brood about, which I did, considering the note Sonja had left on my door, a clear threat. In the morning I called again and there was no answer. In the afternoon I drove over and Step
hanie’s silver Jaguar was parked up the far edge of the circular drive – a glorious sight seeing that car!

  Her mother, youngish in hair combed down near her shoulders, answered the door, didn’t seem shocked to see me, the same way people weren’t shocked to see pigeons. “Stephanie,” she said, “is entertaining gentlemen callers.”

  Though she had grown up in Ohio, she was really a Southern Belle, her mother was.

  Straight out of Gone with the Wind.

  Gentlemen callers. All right.

  “May I come in anyway?”

  She opened the door wide, for uppity though she was, she was not about to be sullen.

  Stephanie was in the den with them, the gentlemen callers, much laughter and happy nonsense filling the room, Stephanie rising to greet me warmly. She introduced me as “an old friend.” The gentlemen callers she introduced by their first names AND their universities so that we had something like Joe Yale, Stephen Harvard, Rory Cambridge and even Lester Sorbonne.

  “Join us,” Stephanie said in a brand new society voice, sounding, in fact, a bit like her mother, which was to be expected as sooner or later she was bound to fill into the privileged role that had been assigned to her by birthright. What made Stephanie a winner was her ability to step in and OUT of that role, and her inclination to even poke fun at the part she had been genetically designed to play.

  The gentlemen callers were scholarly and athletic, part of some university amateur wrestling team. A couple of them had their sights on the next Olympics. One of them asked if I did any college wrestling and I said no, but Stephanie said, “Oh come on, Eli. Aren’t you a black belt or something?” Okay, yes, I had a black belt in martial arts. They weren’t buying this, the gentlemen callers, and one of them snuck up behind (as a test no doubt) and hooked me in a headlock, and just as fast I dumped him and planted a foot into his Adam’s apple.

  This seemed a good time for them to leave, and they left.

  “What a PERFORMANCE!” she said and fell into my arms laughing. “You were DIVINE.”

  Divine.

  “Only doing my bit as AN OLD FRIEND.”

  “Oh, Eli,” she sighed. “You took it all wrong.”

  She kissed me hard on the lips.

  “You’re so SERIOUS,” she whispered, mussing my hair. Then: “Since you came back from New York.”

  “I thought I was funny.”

  “Even then you’re SERIOUS, Eli. Oh so serious.”

  The rich are different from you and me. Oh – that’s been used? Well they are, besides having more money. They recover. They move on. They don’t sweat. Why just the other day she’d been distraught over her PAINTINGS and today? Today she was back to being Stephanie.

  “Did something happen in New York?” she asked.

  “NOTHING happened in New York. That’s why I came back.”

  “I think something happened in New York.”

  “Nothing happened in New York.”

  “Some day you’ll tell me.”

  I had questions, too, but wasn’t about to ask where she’d been all night.

  I had once asked her directly if she was a virgin, back when we spent that day at her country home, walking by the brook, not a question you generally ask a girl, but the moment seemed right, given the fact that she had asked me if any other woman meant anything to me, so I asked her and she blushed and said of course. Of course! That was before California, of course. I had not asked her since. I wouldn’t dare, not only because this time she’d probably be offended but also because by this time she’d probably lost her virginity.

  I now told her we had a genuine loony on our hands. I advised her never to go out alone, maybe hire bodyguards.

  She thought that was even funnier than my earlier performance against her gentlemen callers.

  “Oh, Eli,” she sighed. “Do we have to be SERIOUS?”

  “Bad things happen to rich people, too.”

  She laughed.

  She said I was SWEET for worrying so about her. But she’d be fine. She patted my cheek.

  “You don’t understand what’s going on,” I said.

  “Yes,” she pouted playfully. “You’re so much more MATURE than I am. YOU know what’s going on.”

  “Yes I do and you’re being a brat.”

  I was being MELODRAMATIC, she said, when I brought up the visit from the parole officer, Fat Jack’s concern for her safety, Sonja’s record of having at least two murders to her name, the note she had posted on my door about what’s to come next. I was OVERREACTING because I felt such guilt at having brought this – this Sonja – upon our heads.

  “You’ll have to learn to say no to women,” she said, softly and warmly and indulgently, meaning by that, I guessed, that one way or another, and sooner or later, a woman would be my downfall, given, as she had once put it, my ROMEO COMPLEX, one reason she could never take me really REALLY seriously, much as I tried to persuade her that, to me, she, Stephanie Eaton, was the beginning and the end of all women.

  Now more than ever she was not taking me seriously, assuming, perhaps, that I was making all this up just to have access to her, which may have been partly true – the other part being that her life was in danger. That was also true.

  “Go back to California,” I said, meaning it, too.

  She laughed. I couldn’t get her off that rich girl high, that sense of hers that to be rich, young, and beautiful was to be impermeable. I was just like her mother, she said. I loved drama. “Oh,” she teased. “Now you want me back in the arms of my WILD college professor? The one who puts lampshades on his head? Which he doesn’t DO, by the way, but you were funny. You ARE funny.”

  Poking fun at him was a small victory but beside the point.

  “Is this what you came here to tell me? To leave town?”

  “Yes.”

  “Listen to you.”

  “Yes, listen to me.”

  “Why don’t YOU be my bodyguard?”

  I nodded, but my question was, for always or for tonight?

  “At least for tonight,” she answered without my posing the question.

  So we had a date, our first since she’d been back. We went to a movie, then to Joe’s Bar in Fountain Square, then for coffee and pie a la mode at Sugar n’ Spice. She said she was just getting acclimated to Cincinnati again, after all those months in California, which wasn’t nearly as fast as, say, New York, but was fast regardless, unlike Cincinnati, so it took some time to slow down, back to this town’s tempo, and it really was a Midwestern town, Cincinnati.

  “You don’t really understand that,” she said, “until you leave and come back. How Midwestern this town really is.”

  She looked down. She was thinking deep thoughts.

  “But we always come back, don’t we. You came back. I came back.”

  “For the time being.”

  “I’m not sure I like that,” she said. She played with her spoon. “Are you thinking of leaving again?”

  “Depends.”

  Long silence.

  “On what?”

  “Things.”

  “What things?”

  “Things.”

  “Am I one of those THINGS?” she laughed.

  “Maybe.”

  “Well, I’m not in such a hurry to leave again,” she said. “I also have THINGS.”

  “Of course. You have family,” I said, plainly fishing.

  “Oh. But that wasn’t what I meant. May I ask you a question?”

  “If it’s about WILD PhD college professors…”

  “Oh, Eli. Be serious.”

  “I thought you don’t want me to be SERIOUS.”

  “Well now I do.”

  I put on a serious face.

  “Not THAT serious.”

  I slacked it a bit.

  “Now you’re clowning.”

  I changed my expression suitable for the occasion. It was one of the few acting jobs I could get.

  “Eli,” she sighed, “do you think that you’ll
love me always? Don’t answer that too quickly. Suppose I turn old and gray? Suppose I age badly?”

  “The way I feel now, yes, I’ll love you always.”

  “That’s the key phrase – the way you feel now. You might not always feel that way.”

  “Guess there’s only one way to find out.”

  Was I proposing again? Was SHE proposing again? Would we always go round-and-round like this?

  She smiled. “Aren’t you afraid of the risk? You could wake up one morning next to a broken down old hag.”

  “You’d also be taking a risk.”

  “Looks don’t mean so much to men. Looks mean everything to a woman, I don’t care what they say.”

  “That worries you, your looks?”

  “Sometimes. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just the exterior men are after.”

  “There’s the rest of it, too.”

  “I wonder.”

  “Stephanie, it’s not the looks. It’s the whole package.”

  “Package?” she laughed.

  “You know what I mean. I mean I’ve dated many beautiful women, some more beautiful than you maybe…”

  “EEEli!”

  “Oh hell. What I meant was…”

  She leaned over and kissed me softly. “I know what you meant. I can be very difficult, I know.”

  “Yes you can.”

  “I can be a real ballbuster.”

  “A real what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “BALLBUSTER? That’s not a Stephanie Eaton word.”

  “Are we about to fight?”

  “It was not a Stephanie Eaton word B.C.”

  “B.C.?”

  “Before California. Were you a BALLBUSTER in California?”

  “No I wasn’t. Eli…Oh, Eli.”

  “You came back a BALLBUSTER.”

  “You misinterpret. You misinterpret EVERYTHING.”

  “Stephanie Eaton. Ballbuster.”

  “Eli, I feel like smacking you.”

  “A smacking ballbuster.”

  She laughed happily. “YOU’RE the BALLBUSTER. Or whatever it is the other way.”

  “But I’d never use that word. I’m a gentleman.”